Record number of bears killed in Colorado this year

Friday

Nov 23, 2007 at 12:01 AMNov 23, 2007 at 11:23 PM

59 killed statewide breaks 2002 mark.

Reilly Capps

After they banged their way into trash cans, nuzzled into houses and even jimmied open a number of car doors, a record number of bears have been killed by wildlife officials and law enforcement in Colorado this year.

Statewide, 59 bears have been put down, the Colorado Division of Wildlife said, and the number could still rise. The previous record was set in 2002, with 55 bears.

At least three bears were killed in the Telluride area: two in Mountain Village and two in Lawson Hill. Longtime residents said they couldn’t remember so many bears being killed near here.

“The unfortunate thing is a lot of these can be prevented if people take care of their trash,” said Joe Lewandowski, spokesman for the Colorado Division of Wildlife in Durango.

Colorado normally has a two-strikes rule, whereby a bear caught messing around with trash or a home gets transported to another area. But especially aggressive bears, or ones who have gotten themselves stuck in a car, are killed after their first offence. Bears are getting more inventive. A bear climbed into a complex in Mountain Village. And, in Aspen in October, a bear slid open a glass door and surprised a woman, injuring her face.

The berry crop was thin this year, due to drought and a late-season frost in many parts of Colorado. Trash is an easy source of calories when left unlocked.

Wildlife biologists will meet in the spring to decide what steps to take, including whether to issue more bear hunting tags to try and thin populations. Lewandowski said “there will probably be some adjustments made” in the number of bear tags available to hunters.

Tags are given out on a regional basis. More tags might be appropriate to thin populations in high-density areas like the Roaring Fork Valley, where wildfire-fast development has shrunk the bear habitat. In the area around Telluride, the DOW is more likely to keep things the same.

“In Aspen they’re munching on Chateaubriand,” Lewandowski said.

About 8,000 bear tags were issued statewide last year. Bears are extremely hard to shoot, since they mostly come out at night, and so only 454 bears were killed this year. In comparison, more than 50,000 elk were harvested last year.

But, to more than a few people, who note that it’s the humans who are encroaching on bear territory and not the other way around, letting hunters take down more bears is repugnant.

“We’d say that that’s a terrible idea,” said Megan Fewell, spokeswoman for the American Humane Society. “It merely puts bearskin rugs in the hands of trophy hunters. It does not solve problems. We’d advocate nonlethal solutions.”

She endorsed public education and enforcement of a locked-trash-can rule. But she also suggested other, more unusual steps. Yosemite, for example, has used firecrackers and trained Karelian bear dogs that attack and frighten away bears.

Lewandowski said locking trash cans is the best option. Otherwise, if a drought continues, so will the bear invasion. He said his agency was trapping and transporting so many bears that game wardens with bears on the back were passing each other on the road.

“You trap them and then you have to release them somewhere,” Lewandowski said. “With more development, it’s getting trickier to figure out where to take these bears.”